When patients “fail” to lose weight

Patient failure. 

Patients don't fail…The treatment failed them. 

If you ever read a visit note written in charts, sometimes you will see this blurb when there is a goal, patients were given treatment but they did not respond to treatment.  When we apply this to medical conditions like allergy or asthma, it seems very clinical.

"Patient’s allergies were not controlled with Claritin so we will add a nasal spray. "

What's interesting is when we apply this to a similar chronic recurring medical condition called obesity, it seems less clinical and more shamey -like the patient failed, like they didn't have enough willpower or that they didn’t try hard enough. 

The patient failed to lose weight. 

Maybe this is me being triggered and what is likely my own INTERNAL STIGMA about weight (you can tell i still struggle with this- it really is hard to reprogram our thoughts and beliefs).

But I tell you, I see this all the time in my own patients...

Let’s rephrase this to what is actually true. 

The treatment failed. 

The patient did not fail. 

It simply means we need another treatment .

It simply means we need to approach it from another angle. 

Each treatment “failure” is information. 

Much like Edison and the light bulb who found 10,000 ways on how to not create a lightbulb.

If exercise and diet worked for a person to lose weight and keep their weight off, then that's amazing and they are likely the 5% of the population that can do this.  

But how are the rest of us 95% of the population supposed to feel?

Like moral failures?  Like we should try harder? Like we should muscle it through?

Keep following a recipe that does not create the results you want?

No.  This needs to stop. 

Here is the real fact.  Weight loss is hard.  Weight loss is actually going against what is natural.  It literally is fighting your biology since your brain and body is geared to get energy and keep energy at all costs. 

“Failing to lose weight and maintaining weight loss with diet and exercise alone is not a moral failure.   It simply means we need another treatment.  Without guilt and shame. 

“Failure” is information,

What you do next with that information is the key.

Do you approach it with self-doubt and self-blame and keep working with the outdated belief of Calorie In/Calorie Out?  

Or do you approach it with a recognition that this is hard and you simply need a different approach. That it is time to read a different Manual, a different Recipe that has created results for other people?